"empath" as lexicographic lacuna

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:09 PM -0500 11/28/08, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>Y'all are looking in the wrong places. NOAD has had this from the beginning
>(2001):
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>em*path ... n. (chiefly in science fiction) a
>person with the paranormal ability to apprehend the
>mental or emotional state of another individual.
>

But that still doesn't automatically extend to the usage in the
Michael Connelly novel; FBI agent Rachel Walling is not crediting a
sizable minority of her fellow-agents with any paranormal ability,
just with having empathy toward victims of the crimes they're
investigating.  And the same goes for the acrostic clue, although
that could evoke the above definition.  Connelly's "empath" could
even be a separate back-formation from "empathy" or "empathic" from
the science-fiction sense rather than a bleaching of the paranormal
component.  I haven't gone through the google pages to see if it's
used regularly to mean just someone with (an unusual amount of)
empathy.

LH

>In a message dated 11/24/08 11:08:44 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
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>>  Acrostic spoiler ahead...
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>>  Word P in yesterday's NYT Acrostic is clued as "One who knows how you
>>  feel", and I inferred  the correct answer, _EMPATH_, partly by virtue
>>  of an instance of synchronicity that points to an odd omission:  In
>>  _The Narrows_, a 2004 novel by Michael Connelly I'm currently
>>  reading, the term is applied to those FBI agents who take their cases
>>  personally.  I was curious about when the word was first attested,
>>  and to my surprise _empath_ is unlisted in either the (online) OED or
>>  AHD4, despite the fact that it has both a wikipedia entry (albeit
>>  largely devoted to the science-fiction ESP-y variety of empath as
>>  opposed to the more general sense invoked by Connelly's FBI agent and
>>  the Acrostic designers) and "about 730,000" raw g-hits for the word.
>>
>>  LH
>>
>>  ------------------------------------------------------------
>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
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